You have heard Thomas Bergersen’s music. Just a sliver of it, but that was enough. Enough to give you goosebumps. Enough to understand the intensity of a vast space odyssey to save the human race. Enough to convince you to spend an evening and $14 on a film that grossed $675 million worldwide.
That music you heard was the song “Final Frontier,” featured prominently in Interstellar‘s third and final trailer, which has 16 million views on Youtube. It backs — and helps create, really — two and a half minutes of intense emotion, encapsulating Christopher Nolan’s three-hour space epic in one hundredth of the time. It goes by fast. But its drumstick-clacking tempo, spindly electronica arpeggios and simple, soaring five-tone piano melody leave an impression. It’d be easy to mistake it as the Oscar-nominated score for the film composed by Hans Zimmer — not in style, per se, but in ability to jar the moment loose and keep it floating around in your head, stirring up your perceptions just like the galaxy-spanning movie does. Zimmer and Nolan handpicked Bergersen’s music for the trailer.
This is all to say that the 35-year-old Norwegian makes a hell of a trailer score. He’s doing it at the right time: in 2014 the average marketing budget for a Hollywood film approached $200 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In a recent report, Variety pegged the average budget for a trailer between $5,000 and $2 million. Their social value is understood: film fans trade trailers like sports fans trade highlight reels.
Yet Bergersen — the co-founder of a production company, Two Steps From Hell, that has scored trailers for Interstellar, Star Trek, The Dark Knight, No Country for Old Men and Lincoln — does not consider himself a trailer music composer, and strongly dislikes being lumped into a specific genre. Bergesen didn’t write “Final Frontier” for Two Steps From Hell to be used in a film trailer, but simply as one track on his own album, Sun, which he insists was not created to be shopped for trailers. “My focus has always been on creating good music,” Bergersen wrote in an email. “Whether the music works in a movie, a trailer, a video game, in someone’s home video, or on someone’s headphones in the gym, it really doesn’t matter to me.”
Bergersen is part of a segment of musicians that interact and intersect with films, but also refuse to be defined by the silver screen, or to make the kind of music some professionals term “trailer fuel.” (Other members of this film-music-boundaries-pushing movement include Adam Young, a.k.a. the artist Owl City, who recently announced he’d be releasing a string of scores for films about historic moments that don’t exist). It’s evident in his music and his answers that Bergersen values the classical style and immense power of music written for film; it’s also evident that he doesn’t believe his music should be defined by any one film, or by any films at all, or even by the film music genre. We asked him to share his passion with us, and break down what makes his music powerful, note by note.
Editor’s Note: The following responses have been edited for clarity and length.
Q: How did you get your start in composing?
A: I’ve always thought of the world as a color palette. It’s right there for you to create and be creative with if you have that drive. I could never perform existing music and be content. I have this need to modify it and inject my own ideas into it… Composition was just a natural path for someone who was creative and musically inclined.